A Better Anonabox With The Beaglebone Black

A few weeks ago, Anonabox, the ill-conceived router with custom firmware that would protect you from ‘hackers’ and ‘legitimate governments’ drew the ire of tech media. It was discovered that this was simply an off-the-shelf router with an installation of OpenWrt, and the single common thread in the controversy was that, ‘anyone can build that. This guy isn’t doing anything new.’

Finally, someone who didn’t have the terrible idea of grabbing another off the shelf router and putting it up on Kickstarter is doing just that. [Adam] didn’t like the shortcomings of the Anonabox and looked at the best practices of staying anonymous online. He created a Tor dongle in response to this with a Beaglebone Black.

Instead of using wireless like the Anonabox and dozens of other projects, [Andy] is using the Beaglebone as a dongle/Ethernet adapter with all data passed to the computer through the USB port. No, it doesn’t protect your entire network; only a single device and only when it’s plugged in.

The installation process is as simple as installing all the relevent software, uninstalling all the cruft, and configuring a browser. [Adam] was able to get 7Mb/sec down and 250kb/sec up through his Tor-ified Ethernet adapter while only using 40% of the BBB’s CPU.

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29 thoughts on “A Better Anonabox With The Beaglebone Black”

Its just too bad that using tor and or linux will get you flagged as a possible domestic terrorist by the NSA. Tor can’t be trusted anyways. The majority of the exit nodes are setup just for the purpose of tracking tor users. Ever notice how slow tor was.. then all of the sudden.. Exit nodes everywhere.. yeah.. Gonna have to find another solution to escape the prying eyes of hysterically paranoid and murderous governments.

Not really. Hackaday is not worth flagging. Anybody that would do something dangerous to the nation that is dumb enough to go to a site called Hackaday is in the random wacko range. Too much noise to filter trying to catch the random wackos. Frankly their are just too many of them but most are so inept as to be harmless.

The author of this article nor creator of the “Tor Dongle” really get security and the advantage of these routers. Don`t follow their advice / claims … Don`t be stupid.

The Tor Dongle only acts as a proxy that could just as well have been installed on the host system. The Browser has to be configured to use that proxy, but this can easyly be bypassed, because all other traffic (flash, DNS,…) is mostlikely unencrypted. You are not anonymous at all with this…

Tor routers are especially save because ALL traffic is routed through them by default.
You can not bypass this by trying to force the client to use unencrypted connections, since the client cannot connect to the web through any other means than the router.